Plenary Speaker: Professor Alistair McCleery, Co-Director of SAPPHIRE,Professor of Literature and Culture at Napier University, and co-editorof The Book History Reader

Following on from the success of last yearâ€™s conference, the MakingBooks, Shaping Readers project at the Department of English, UniversityCollege Cork, invite submissions for twenty-minute papers on the themeShaping Readers: Selection and Editing. We encourage individual proposalsas well as suggestions for panels.

The conference will explore the editorâ€™s role in shaping the material weread, which in turn shapes our reception of the text. Editions of textsare at the core of all research in the humanities, and our readings of,and responses to, texts are often subtly shaped by editorial decisionsand selections. Editorial processes are not objective or neutral, andfrequently happen without comment. Papers might focus on, but are notlimited to, some of the following:

â€¢ What is an editor?â€¢ Textual â€˜corruptionâ€™â€¢ Authorial intentionâ€¢ The social textâ€¢ The role of the publisherâ€¢ Textual variantsâ€¢ The reader as editorâ€¢ The role of technologyâ€¢ Theories of selection and compilationâ€¢ The effect of selection and editing on materialityâ€¢ Anthologies, scholarly editions and canon formation

In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the project, we invitepapers from scholars in all disciplines. Selected papers may be includedin a an edited volume. Accepted abstracts will be published on ourwebsite prior to the conference.

Abstracts (300-500 words) should be sent to the organisers: Dr SiobhÃ¡nCollins, Dr Carrie Griffin and Mary Oâ€™ Connell, at mbsr_at_ucc.ie no laterthan 14th January 2008.